The Sacred River (9 page)

It was late May and the summer was beginning cool and wet. The next Sunday was rainy, the sand scarred with shallow depressions, the beach deserted. Louisa walked for an hour, then went home in low spirits, but the following week, she saw the man again. He was alone, standing on the shore as if he were waiting for an omnibus, puffing cigar smoke into the air over his head in short, fierce bursts.

“There you are,” he said as she approached, pretending not to have noticed him. “At last.”

“Good afternoon,” she said stiffly.

He fell into step beside her, walking along the water’s edge, the dark stink of tobacco mingling with the smell of salt and rotting seaweed. He wasn’t much taller than she and he labored as he walked, his breath heavy, his watch chain rattling on the horn buttons of a check waistcoat under his overcoat. The tide was coming in, surreptitiously, flicking its tongue over the sand. A wave reached his boot and he kicked at it, splashed foam in the air.

“Damned stuff.”

Louisa giggled.

“It’s just the tide. It’s coming home, sir,” she said.

“Home?” he said.

They had reached the end of the bay, under the cliff, and could walk no farther without wading out through the water, over the rocks, around the point. He threw the end of his cigar into the sea, turned to Louisa, and put his hand under her chin. His fingers were roughened and bent, the nails flecked with blue and black paint. He turned her face one way then another, tilting it to the sun.

Louisa wasn’t given to blushing, to displaying her feelings on her face, as some of her sisters were in the habit of doing. Her burning was all on the inside and the gesture, the sureness of his touch, lit a fire in her.

The man let go of her jaw.

“I’m going to paint you. We stay at the dower house. Come in the morning, early.”

She shook her head.

“I cannot. My mother won’t—”

“Yes, she will. Tell her Augustus wants you for a model. I’ll be waiting.”

He looked at her again, up and down, as if he owned her. A faint, urgent ringing traveled through the still air. Lavinia was summoning her from the garden of the house on the top of the cliff, banging on the old saucepan with a flint. Louisa looked up, shading her eyes with her hand, squinting into the distance. High up above was the figure of a boy, dressed in a sailor suit and so still that for an instant she thought it was a statue that looked down at her.

“I must go now,” she said to Augustus. “Good day.”

Turning back in the direction of the house, she walked away, faster than she knew she could, weightless, skirting around her footprints in the sand, and his, as the water began to fill them. She felt as if she could have walked on the surface of the sea, all the way along the bay.

And so it began.

•  •  •

As the ship proceeded southeast through the Mediterranean Sea, past shoals of porpoises and huge floating turtles, past fishing vessels and, occasionally, a steamer traveling in the other direction, Louisa kept to the cabin. She rested on her bunk or sat at the small table with her tatting. She’d brought a pattern and a quantity of silk, intending to complete a tablecloth while they were away. One purl, one plain. Two purl, two plain. One purl, one plain. The repetition soothed her.

There was nothing to worry about, she insisted to herself. If Eyre Soane had recognized her—and she couldn’t be certain that he had—she would avoid him. They would never meet him once they arrived in Egypt; she had seen from the globe what a large country it was. The idea of not encountering him again prompted a sense of loss. As much as Louisa dreaded it, she found herself longing to see Eyre Soane, to hear tidings that only he could provide.

THIRTEEN

Harriet’s first impression of Alexandria was its color. The city looked white, made up of white flat-roofed houses, white domed mosques flanked by delicate minarets, and pale-trunked palm trees topped with explosions of upward-reaching leaves. Standing on the crowded deck, almost shaking with excitement, Harriet felt as if it were impossible that the port should have looked anything other than exactly the way it did. She had an odd sensation, as if she already knew it.

An Egyptian pilot came aboard and steered the ship between a solid stone lighthouse and a reef of black rocks into a wide natural harbor, full of ships of every description, the sky overhead smudged with smoke from their funnels. The ship received clearance, the surgeon blasted a whistle, and a flotilla of small boats that had been waiting at a distance began streaming toward the
Star of the East
, rowed by men in robes of blue and scarlet and green, their heads wrapped in turbans or covered in close-fitting caps. Egypt was coming out to meet them, the Arabs waving and gesturing at the passengers, their cries filling the air.

The deck was packed—with men, women with babies in arms, old people who’d scarcely been seen for the length of the journey. Harriet scanned the hats of the women, looking for one elegant enough to belong on the head of Mrs. Cox. She’d been back to the medical room to leave her another note. Since the storm, Zebedee Cox had avoided her when she’d seen him on deck, turning on his heel and walking in the other direction.

Glancing around again, Harriet saw the man who’d embarked with his piano. The same back in the same pale jacket moved up onto the bridge, following behind Captain Ablewhite’s dark blazer. As the man ducked through the door, Harriet glimpsed his profile, serious-looking and straight-nosed.

“Fine morning!”

The Reverend Ernest Griffinshawe was standing by her aunt.

“The Dark Continent lies before us,” he said, his eyes fixed on the horizon. “Awaiting the light of our Lord.”

“I shall go no farther than Alexandria,” Yael said, raising her voice over the shouts of the porters, the clank of the anchor chain still unspooling into the clear turquoise sea. “Alexandria is on the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean is part of Europe. Europe is England’s next-door neighbor. I declare before God that I shall go no farther than this city.”

She got down on her knees on the deck and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

Our Father, who art in Heaven
. . .

Some women standing near by began to titter behind their hands.

“Really, Yael, I am not sure that this is the time or the place,” said Louisa, as Reverend Griffinshawe frowned at the women and knelt beside Yael, adding his louder voice to hers.

Give us this day
. . .

Some of the older female passengers joined them, sinking clumsily to their knees behind Yael and the parson.

And forgive us our trespasses
. . .

Harriet barely heard them. At the front of the crush of people stood a man dressed in a brown velvet jacket and breeches. The red scarf at his neck fluttered in the breeze as the painter handed a folded easel to an Arab who’d boarded the ship. He oversaw the unloading of a pair of matching portmanteaus, then disappeared over the side and down the accommodation ladder, his paintbox under his arm.

Since the night of the dinner, Harriet had only glimpsed Eyre Soane at his easel, intent on his canvas, his posture inviting no interruption. She felt as if she might have imagined that he had ever watched them, ever come so purposefully to sit with them, as if—it seemed to her now—he had some mission that he had not declared.

The man had imprinted himself on her mind. Each time she remembered the way he’d looked at her after she and Louisa left the table, a current of an unfamiliar feeling ran through her and left her disturbed.

Pushing her way in between the crowd, Harriet looked down over the railing. Brightly painted boats crowded under the prow, with barefoot men standing up in them, holding out their hands to receive trunks and parcels, calling for business in a soup of languages. Half a dozen or more of the little crafts had their sails hoisted and were tacking back toward the quay with their passengers. Mr. Soane had disappeared.

“Miss Heron!”

Looking to starboard, she saw a red boat bobbing on the translucent sea, the painter seated in it. He raised his head from the match cupped in his hand and lifted his arm in a wave.

“Good morning,” he called over the water in a pleasant voice, as if they were old acquaintances.

“Good morning, Mr. Soane,” she called back.

“Welcome to Egypt. Tell your mother I shall visit you.”

Too surprised to speak, Harriet nodded, reaching automatically for her journal in the pocket around her waist. As the boat carried Eyre Soane toward the dock, she watched, feeling the strong beat of the sun on her face, breathing in air that smelled of salt and sun, that carried a trace of cigar smoke.

FOURTEEN

Harriet sat on one side of the worn leather seat, Louisa in the middle, and Yael at the far end. The horse slowed to a walk as they passed along a narrow alley, past dark cavelike shops stocked with bolts of cloth, glassware, tinned goods. Over everything was a geometric pattern of light and shade, cast by lengths of sacking stretched overhead between the roofs of the buildings. The streets teemed with people, with color, with life and the cries of voices and animals.

Harriet felt the strangeness physically, like heat or cold; every part of her body tingled with impressions, as if the surroundings were both more real than any she had ever experienced in her life and at the same time utterly unreal.

“Arab town, Sitti,” Mustapha shouted, turning his head to them from where he sat at the front of the cab, next to the driver. Mustapha had met them on the quay and introduced himself as their housekeeper.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Yael. “How did you know it was us?”

“Three ladies,” he’d announced, helping them up, hitching his robe to display narrow, scarred ankles, naked feet clad in pointed slippers. “I know he is three ladies.”

A girl was hurrying beside them, squeezed into the gap between the carriage and the mud walls. Her eyes, half closed, oozing a yellow secretion, were trained in their direction and she held out a palm, calling for baksheesh.

“That poor child,” Yael said. “Can you see her, Louisa?” The driver touched the horse with his whip, and as the animal broke into a trot, the girl caught hold of the armrest and was pulled along. “Slow down, driver,” Yael cried, reaching forward and tapping the man on the shoulder. “Stop.”

Mustapha issued instructions in a strange, harsh tongue and with a yank of the reins the driver pulled up the horse. Yael began fumbling in her bag. Extracting two English pennies, she leaned down from the cab, pressed them into the girl’s hand.

“God bless you, dear,” she said as the child darted away.

“The guidebook advises against giving alms on the street,” Louisa said.

“She was half starved,” Yael said, closing up her Gladstone bag. “And did you see her eyes?”

“Poor,” Mustapha said, turning his head to them, smiling, showing a row of the whitest teeth Harriet had ever seen. “She is poor.”

He laughed and the carriage moved off again.

“We have poor children in London, Mr. Farr,” Yael said loudly. “But they do not go naked as the day they were born.”

Her hands gripped each other in her lap as the carriage swayed on through the old town and out under a stone gateway and into a grand square, lined with gracious buildings, made of white stone and adorned with balconies and striped awnings. The strolling people wore European dress and red felt hats. Harriet saw an African boy, laden with packages, running behind a fashionable woman. She had a sick, certain feeling that she saw a slave.

Minutes later, the driver drew up the horses outside a pair of high iron gates. A watchman scrambled to his feet and Harriet followed Louisa and Yael into a garden dominated by a huge tree. Its branches curled upward like the legs of spiders and its leaves were sharp and dark, as if they had been folded into triangles.

“
Araucaria araucana
,” Yael announced, pausing to look up into it. “The monkey puzzle. We had one at home.”

It didn’t resemble a living thing at all, Harriet thought, passing underneath it and along the path to a square stone house with shuttered windows. Mustapha ushered them through the double wooden door, across a vestibule, and into a courtyard in the center of the house that, she realized with delight, stood open to the sky.